The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
datagubbe.se
datagubbe.se
It is well alive. Sure, we still see some of the same people from 1989, and the average age is certainly going up, but it absolutely doesn't mean we aren't seeing new blood. Styles change, technical achievement is usually seen in the sizecoding or "wild" competitions, while PC demos tend to be more cinematic and focused on art. We are seeing new things, like livecoding shaders and fantasy consoles. Of course, the Amigas and other oldschool platforms are still there, with new tricks being discovered year after year.
There are still regular demoparties. Revision, the successor to Breakpoint and Mekka Symposium is doing well year after year. With the addition of some online events like Lovebyte.
Things come and go, but there is no sign of the scene really being dead. Heck, we even seen older demosceners bring their children to the parties, with some of them already doing cool stuff.
(I mean this with deep sarcasm.)
For a time the demoscene looked bigger than it was, mostly because of all the cracks. But for the people who actually produced stuff or went to demoparties or even just seek out productions that weren't cracks, it has always been a small world, like a few thousands of active people worldwide.
Things like PICO-8, etc.
It's much harder to throw a big party these days in general, and especially so about technical niches. Hack Club is popular with youth, but much more about smaller gatherings.
Over the summer, we hosted a vibecoding PICO-8 game jam in Amsterdam. It wasn’t a demoparty but we nevertheless had some amazing demoscene folks show up with c64s and example demos. We attracted a handful of teenagers and had nearly equal gender balance—and made some really creative games. We definitely experienced some hateful online vitriol about vibecoding (eg “you are the human equivalent of cancer”) but that was to be expected—this event was almost deliberately about the tension between deep understanding and rapid iteration cycles. I found the tension between vibecoding and demoscene to be really enjoyable and productive.
Or maybe the prices are even higher because the few who are interested know that stamps are forever a thing of the past, and in a way that makes them more unique and have timeless value.
Documentation is also in something of a state—the big video game consoles (NES, SNES, Genesis..) all have plenty of free, modern high quality guides teaching you how to program them from nothing, understand all the hardware, etc.. then look at the '80s computers (*especially* the Amiga) and it seems to mainly be scattered around old book scans and wiki articles assuming varying levels of pre-existing knowledge of the hardware. Strangely enough a lot of the best documentation seems to be from YouTube tutorials (I guess because you can see what they're actually doing). It sounds wrong to call it "stuck in the past" but I guess that would be the best way to describe it.
This isn't really about the scene specifically but it's somewhat related at least.
Much better times today, imo.
Sure we had thermonuclear war threats and a bit of AIDS. But that was basically all.
But as far as my craft is concerned (coding) there's no question about it, everything is so much easier now !
I guess part of the reason was that the consoles never had public development kits or manuals, so when the homebrew scene emerged they had to bootstrap themselves (and in the process usually created better manuals/tools than the OEMs), compared to all the home computers where of course they were always available and nobody felt a reason to rewrite them all.
My guess is that as time goes on, more development knowledge will be captured/OCRed into machine-searchable archives that will help the beginners. Using emulated/virtual development tool chains is also a lot less resource-intensive, and will help newcomers who don't know how to set these things up on their own.
(been there, done that, got several t-shirts :-) )
Cohost had fun vibes like that as well, but I guess it's no longer with us. Same with Glitch, but admittedly I didn't use it in the last few years, but it was my go to option for hosting a snippet of unserious HTML. "HTML in the park" does seem like one fun IRL outlet for this kind of thing, I found out my city has one and I want to go to it.
Admittedly none of these were really demo scenes or places where creative coding was exclusively fostered, but creative coding and demo-like-scenes communities probably exist but are more likely some obscure discord server.
It's not about loads of people commenting and liking your work, just finding a place to actually discuss it would be fantastic
This scene isn’t dead; we should just look beyond 3D glitter. See File Pilot [1] for another compact, clever example.
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0: https://www.reaper.fm/download.php(Unlike, say, the Visual Basic IDE, which had two custom toolkits—the one the apps used and the one the IDE did—or Office, which AFAIU included three or four divergent versions—for Access, for Word and Excel, for VBA apps, and for the VBA IDE, with the last two being effectively identical to the respective VB ones, though I don’t know if the IDE and the Word/Excel ones were actually different. And that’s not counting IE’s toolkit, which basically displaced USER controls in HTML forms by the time of IE6. None of these count as slim, is my point.)
But what really makes me wonder here is how File Pilot manages to display what looks in the screenshot like a shell item’s (file’s) full context menu using its custom styling.
My impression was that the atrocious and discordant two-level Explorer context menu Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11 was because the traditional (Windows 95-era) way to provide context menu items with was to write a shell extension (an Explorer plugin, which would get loaded not only into the bloody system shell but also into every app that used common file dialogs) that would get called when the menu was being built. And that callback interface was built around the assumption of menu items being traditional HMENUs (and allowed the shell extension to set up arbitrary drawing routines for the items it added). So changing the toolkit that Explorer used for context menus away from USER was essentially impossible, and even styling it differently from Windows 95 was fraught (I do remember seeing the occasional flat-gray menu item on Windows XP with Luna enabled). There was an attempt to transition to more declarative context menus around (IIRC) Windows 7, but evidently adoption wasn’t good. And thus the Windows 11 Explorer was forced to use the embarrassing hack of initially showing the declarative context menu, drawn using its new toolkit, then grafting the real one, drawn using USER, onto it as a submenu.
And yet.
File Pilot draws the full context menu with a look very similar to Explorer’s preferred one.
How?..
We shouldn't forget that half of the documentation on how everything should work was only released after anti-trust investigation and pressure from courts.
https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/shell/index.ht...
By that time, Windows had already switched to shiny fresh undocumented technologies.
You should remember that a lot of software around the Millennium simply re-implemented latest fashion trends (Office controls, XP styles, etc.) on their own in not quite exact ways, not just because programmers back then wore skins, and ate raw meat, and feared nothing, and because such third party toolkits were available commercially, but also because official interfaces to do the same were not offered until later releases (or sometimes ever). I vaguely recall discussions of teams within Microsoft sometimes doing the same, resulting in Office controls sharing no code with common controls used by the rest of the system which look exactly the same.
The irony is that web browsers, being the most popular kind of application, and interfaces built on top of their technology simply ignore the native interface toolkits, and do everything independently, which is even more extreme than some old school custom paint handlers. A lot of work has been spent on re-implementing native look and behaviour there, multiple times.
One of the examples of actively supported applications interfacing with shell object hierarchy without using system dialogs I can name is Tixati, which needs to have file picker(s) at hand inside its own dialogs. It's not open source, but it has been using GTK, custom controls, and probably some sauce on top. Given the user complains about its performance or missing items, and regular appearance in change log over the years, I'd say it's a wrestling game for the author. At the moment the tree is lazily populated at the first appearance, which is fine, but not unnoticeable.
It is a bit hilarious that showing a list of file names in some directory is a trivial example on using system-provided iterators for the novice programmers, but adding icons matching those that Explorer shows (handling links and other special files, special directories, non-filesystem-based locations which still have files user might want to choose in them, etc) to that list suddenly becomes a nightmare.
Demosceners and indie devs are working under different constraints. For demosceners, the file size (4kb, 40kb, etc.) is the goal. For devs, especially those making a tool that you download and install, extreme size constraints seem unnecessary (although avoiding bloat is always good).
Instead, it seems to me that primary constraints for indie devs should be things like being easy to maintain, well documented, easy to use, easy to fix bugs, easy for other people to work on and extend. Small size should be a secondary target rather than primary.
Of course, one of the advantages of being indie is that you can set whatever constraints and targets you like for yourself.
"If demosceners can do it" is not a good argument to talk about software, because demosceners are the cream of the software crop, when it comes to the specific thing that the demoscene is all about. It's like saying if racers can make that corner doing a 100, regular drivers have no excuse. Or I'm greatly misunderstanding your point.
Filepilot looks great. I wouldn't pay, as Double Commander serves me just fine, but an 1.8 MB download is impressive. DC is 10 MB in comparison. Still perfectly fine.
That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!
In hindsight I would have loved something like the 2010s game jams and indie games culture to have existed in the early 1990s. Guess this just proves how much of a lamer I was.
"You see, when a cracking crew beat the protection of a new game, they would upload their hacked version to an elite BBS and repackaged it with a little intro and a trainer. They had to be very creative and skilled, often working directly in assembler, in order to achieve impressive imagery and chip music while still fitting on the same 1.4MB floppy."
blank stare
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
This piqued the interest of curious youth, who then were further enabled by a hardware interface where you could write a value into an area of memory, which would then appear as a pixel on screen.
There are many groups and parties to mention, but for those interested have a look over at: https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php
https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2025-demosc...
After all the most talented musicians and visual designers often were not the same people, and every artistic pursuit involves a lot of iteration.
To be fair groups tended to build the tools themselves, not to take away from their achievements, but once the tools are done and public (like the ones you shared), a lot of the challenge and point of competition is gone.
Tooling also tends to create a moat between 'users' and 'developers', the former of which lack the low-level knowledge to transition into the latter.
The stuff I've written for 64k intros:
- Rendering system (software renderers in the 90s and latest a non-RTX raytracing systems with global illumination), these alone is kinda what people write or wrote MSc thesis works on.
- SDF based effects/rendering (this is what 4k intros often focus on apart from music, here it becomes an addition to the above toolset).
- Often some keyframing/skinning systems, either customized or imported from Blender(now) or in the past 3dsmax, lightwave,etc. (and matching the keyframing maths of the tools), the kind of shit that made game industry companies adopt 3rd party engines because it's hard to get correct (luckily for demos with small teams we can avoid some pitfalls of the formats).
- A modular softsynth (with sequenceing, genrerators and filters) with a MDCT based compressor (think MP3 like compression)
- Texture and image via generators and filters.
- A few generations of visual editing tools to have visual editing of various things listed above.
(Yes, some people have created more abstract things in 64k intros but those don't push the envelope as much imho).
Oh and once all that is done, nobody will run it because...
- The exe compressors used to make things small have been adopted by malware writers and antivirus programs will flag everything because antivirus software just profiles the unpacker routines.
(4k writers have less of an issue with this because the 64k compressors are more drop-in whilst crinkler that's used for 4k's is a custom linker that will have less of a profile and requires custom build steps).
As for Raspberry PI's, there has been compos to target them and phones but the capability of a Raspberry PI and phones is close enough to a PC that you're not really constrained in any pracitcal way apart from needing to push it onto that machine.
On that tangent however Pico-8 and similar pseudoconsoles have been popular since they often provide a simple IDE environment that let's people get straight to it and have a clear recgonizable restriction level.
Assembly, Summer 2023: https://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/Assembly+Summer+2023/Perj...
Assembly, Summer 2024: https://assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/ASSEMBLY+SUMMER+2024/PERJ...
Looks like plenty of attendance, lots of elementary through high school age attendees. Lots of families bringing their children. Site's got 1000's of pictures of evidence.
Maybe the scene has change in a way they don't especially want to attend over the years, yet it does not seem to be "dying". This post on LinkedIn claims Summer 2023 had 25,000 attendees. Seems healthy.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lassinummi_assembly-summer-20...
Minor edit: Also, still have all the results and competitions each year. Demo, 1k Intro, 4k Intro, Short Film, Dance Music, Freestyle Graphics, ect...
Results, Summer 2023: https://assembly.org/en/events/summer23/posts/assembly-summe...
Results, Summer 2024: https://assembly.org/en/articles/assembly-summer-2024-compet...
I must also confess my sacrilege, Amiguy: a buddy gave me his Amiga 500. Shortly after, the floppy drive on my STe broke down. So I took apart the one from the Amiga and put it in my ST... I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Now you can beat me up... but calm down. It's not like the Amiga's drive was its strong point, was it? I couldn't have done that with the Copper and its friends, and sure I wish I could have!
/hollowone^oftenhide
English is not my main language, so I don't understand the nuance. Does this imply that this is your first rant on HN in 20 years?
Sizecoding is another matter, and arguably the more interesting side of the scene these days. But it is kinda sad that we need artificial restrictions to make things interesting rather than trying to exploit every drop of perf you can squeeze from the computer.
Is it hackathons?
Wrt/ terminology, one submission of such a work is a "demo", and "demoscene" is the name for the culture itself (people, events, submissions, associated works like websites).
For an easy example, the all-time most popular work is this one: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244 (according to the site's own ranking). You can download the software to run yourself, or you can watch a youtube recording of it, which is much more accessible. The entirety of this work (visuals, music) is compiled into a single 177k executable.
How to tell you've never been to a demo party without saying you've never been to a demo party.
I jest, but scrambling to implement the last effect before the deadline, or fix some stupid last minute bug was certainly typical at the events I was at. And you see this in a lot of the prods which released post-party "proper" versions.
There were also parties which had "live" competitions, where a theme would be announced at the party and you had then just a few hours to make a demo. Obviously wouldn't do it from scratch but typically coding would be involved, if for nothing else to tie the effects together.
But yeah, the main demos and intros would primarily be made well in advance.
This is referring to demo parties specifically. Let's not forget the social aspects of them though. Yes, a selected few went to parties to "compete" in their chosen art, some might have even taken them quite seriously. But they were the minority.
The bulk of the attendees just went for fun and company, and did not create anything. Demoparties _were indeed_ parties back in the 90s, with people playing games, drinking and socializing in general. You could argue these were like rave parties, only a bit quieter and much friendlier / inclusive (ok, maybe I am biased, but it certainly felt that way).
It was lacking in one aspect though - not many girls attended, and so as time passed these parties were becoming less attractive. But that did not stop anyone going home and downloading and admiring the products of demosceners, who did all this basically in their free time, for not much (if at all) compensation.
My personal involvement with this scene is nil - I always just saw some interesting thing playing with crack.exe that I got from some dubious source, thought "huh it's neat", and went on with my life.
I have no idea what are the constraints do they have in 2025, or what platform do they even target. How are you gonna do demos on iOS that's all locked from top to bottom and you can't even run anything without involving Apple in the process?
One great analogy I heard somewhere -- if videogames are prose, demos are poetry.
But Wikipedia says this is primarily a European thing, so I guess that's why.
In 2012, I created a live coding platform and spent a lot of time thinking about why live coding didn’t become more popular than traditional coding. Live coding came about 10 years before React, which became reactive because you no longer had to press F5 every time you updated the HTML (I worked on the first version of React Webpack, which was doing server-side rendering).
Later, after going through a startup accelerator, the puzzle finally clicked for me. Companies and businesses began making serious money from video games, discovering lots of talent in the wild indie dev and demoscene space. The best talents were like raw gems and this eventually scaled into an industry.
Now, the best innovations are being patented and presented at SIGGRAPH and the game engine market is massive. Of course, amid all the flashiness and white-collar presence, it’s hard to spot the demosceners, but they’re behind every game. They’ve just been hired by corporations and their talent no longer expresses itself in the same way.
Unfortunately, companies provide very little support for the demoscene, which is why we don’t see the same explosive growth here as we do in games, graphics or AI.
I remember one case where a guy was hired to animate King Kong’s face for a movie and he spent two years hand-animating every single emotion. I wonder what kind of demos he might have created during that time if the corporation hadn’t hired him and forced him into repetitive work.
The market.
Now that is to say a demo can't be portable, for instance I've run several older demos on my computer. I've also had instances where demos wouldn't run on my computer. Imagine if that was a game that I bought. Or imagine if it was anstracted to such a point that the feature is just not available dynamically. For instance of particle effect became 100 times less impressive.
Now that PC's are so powerful, you look for algorithms optimisation. And although it requires a ton of cleverness as well, it's much more documented than obscure hacks. You learn that at school.
And the cracking scene has now to grapple with hellish online activation.
And then many workflows have become sort of professional or moved to the web altogether.
And the younger generation, having received access to gigabytes of RAM and storage, simply couldn't care less about being super lean and fast.
There's really no future for the scene.
It's interesting I often attribute this to VCs and their desire for growth over efficiency (let alone profitability). I find myself having to reel in my desire to challenge myself to identify the most efficient way possible, even if it only saves a few dollars.
Never occurred to me it was generational and not related to VCs
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
It’s already long over. We’re just starting to notice. The EFF is baffled - why do they yell in a void now, when just a decade ago they stopped SOPA/PIPA with dramatic effect?
The free internet and the communities that support it have lost their voice and their cultural support. Interesting. It couldn’t possibly be because they stepped beyond common sense and became an echo chamber amongst themselves… right?
(There are many things popular on HN, heresy to question, that even I as a participant emphatically do not support, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I’ve learned hinting at these views gets downvotes and bad faith feedback… so it’s hard to cry at the growing irrelevance. It’s deserved.)
If the goal is to get more than 50% usage statistics then yeah, you can say they lost, but are dev tools only valid/useful/viable if they have a majority of developers using them? I say they've had tremendous success being able to provide viable tools with literally zero corporate support and a much smaller user base.
that was probably over 15 years ago.
- People in the early 90s probably weren't there so much for the demos as for the swapping (ie game copying), it was called copy-parties before it was called lan or demoparties.
--> As such , the numbers of really active sceners was probably about the same all through the 90s up until 2000, the decline in some areas was probably more a function of money being available to talented people as well as the internet overtaking reasons for gatherings (being copying or gaming)
- "The farting around with 6502's (C64) and blitters(Amiga)" is partly a Swedish thing. (related to the mentioned Dreamhack lan/esport-parties)
--> Those who never left and/or are return-ees (people with grown kids) are heavily into those retro-machines because they were a tad older and grew up with that and always held that special place for them. The last large Swedish demo-generations are still tied up in their careers and/or kids and haven't really begun returning (if they ever will thatis).
- The actually somewhat eventful story of Dreamhack (And the early demise of the Swedish demoscene rejuvenation)
--> Swedish sceners started earlier to get adopted into commercial endeavors, but the death-knell was that a deadly discotheque fire in Gothenburg had happened a few weeks before the 1998 Dreamhack event, rowdy sceners were thrown out since a nervous organization didn't dare have any scandalous behavior after pressure from teen parents with sceners subsequently deciding to start boycotting Dreamhack. Once that rift had happened and quality suffered there was never any real push about keeping the demoscene as a part of their lan-focused culture with an eventual total demise happening.
I think cultures have thresholds, we tried and actually managed some rejuvenation while some of us in that last large Swedish generation was still in our 20s (however as the article points out, it was a trickle and we were probably too few with the wrong focus perhaps), now in our 40s we're probably not going to be inspiring any teens directly.
Also the engagement threshold, as many from our generations are now established professionals (like from people that designed the EA-Frostbite engine,etc) the quality put out as "side-projects" are still enormously more adept than what beginners can approach, yet feeble compared to the pure engineering effort managed by the professional game making tools.
Sure you can easily partake, but it's probably demotivating knowing that what you make has such a long way to go (we feel it ourselves).
Will it die out totally? I was actually more worried 5-10 years ago, kids need creative outlets and the entire AI-storm that might make some demotivated will also create more unemployment for capable people, and after all, the golden eras were during times when kids were getting talented but couldn't find jobs for those talents.